Group Asks Lakewood Church Pastor to Promote Compassion for All God's Creatures This Easter
For Immediate Release:
March 29, 2012
Contact:
Shakira Croce 202-483-7382
Houston -- With Easter right around the corner, PETA has sent a letter to pastor, author, and broadcaster Joel Osteen with an offer that will help his congregation celebrate the holiday in style: Hang PETA's "Blessed Are the Merciful: Go Vegan" banner, which features an image of a little pig, in the church, and PETA will prepare a delicious Easter Sunday faux-ham meal with all the trimmings for his parishioners. As PETA explains in the letter to Osteen—who has long encouraged his followers not to eat pork because it is "unclean"—crowded factory farms and slaughterhouses are breeding grounds for disease, so beef, chicken, and other meat also carry a high risk of being tainted with salmonella, E. coli, and other bacteria. What's more, the meat industry inflicts enormous suffering on animals, who depend on humans to show them mercy.
"When slaughterhouse floors and fishing boat decks are crawling with bacteria, all meat is 'unclean,'" says PETA Associate Director Christopher Holbein. "PETA is standing by to help Joel Osteen's churchgoers show love and mercy to all God's creatures this Easter by choosing delicious, healthy, and humane meat-free meals."
For more information, please visit PETA.org.
PETA's letter to Joel Osteen follows.
March 29, 2012
The Reverend Joel Osteen
Joel Osteen Ministries
2 pages via fax
Dear Mr. Osteen,
On behalf of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and our more than 3 million members and supporters, including thousands in Texas, thank you for encouraging your parishioners to eliminate pork from their diets. We would like to reinforce your message by offering you a banner—which features the image of a little pig and reads, "Blessed Are the Merciful: Go Vegan"—to hang inside or outside the church in time for Easter. (A copy of the artwork is attached.) As thanks for displaying the banner, we'd be happy to give your parishioners a delicious Easter Sunday faux-ham meal.
The health reasons you have cited in your sermons for not eating pigs largely apply to other animals as well. As the American Dietetic Association points out, meat-eaters are more susceptible to heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and obesity than vegetarians are. In addition, animals on factory farms are intensively confined in filthy conditions and slaughtered with equipment that is contaminated with feces, vomit, and other bodily fluids. These grossly unsanitary environments breed enormous amounts of bacteria. According to a Consumer Reports survey, a whopping two-thirds of grocery store chicken meat is tainted with campylobacter or salmonella, and more than 70 percent of meat tested by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was found to be contaminated by E. coli.
As Jesus said, "Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy." An ever-growing number of Christians have come to believe that eating the flesh of God's creatures supports the unholy cruelty of today's factory farms and slaughterhouses, where chickens and turkeys have their throats cut while they're still conscious, piglets have their tails and testicles cut off without any painkillers, fish are suffocated or cut open alive on the decks of fishing boats, and calves are taken away from their loving mothers within hours of birth. For more information, please visit Meat.org.
I think you would agree that Jesus would be horrified by the cruelty that is inflicted on animals to satisfy people's taste for meat, especially when so many healthful vegan options are there for the taking. We would be pleased to send you free copies of our "Christianity and Vegetarianism" pamphlets, vegetarian/vegan starter kits, and children's stickers showing a baby chick declaring, "Jesus loves me too!" Thank you for your consideration.
Sincerely,
Christopher Holbein
Associate Director